1 - I would suggest that the "About Us," "Forums" etc be given a larger area, to accommodate the graphics and written text. As it is, it looks like scribblings. This is not intended to be a criticism of your stellar work, Ponder--just a reaction.

2 - This is a bit trickier. Should the word "Fan" appear? I know we're all here because of StevenF, but he hasn't made a cartoon in, what, six or seven years? I would suggest, again without disrespect intended, that we're a fairly independent entity.

So how about, instead of "The Official Spamusement! Fan Site" it reads "The New Spamusement! Site." Maybe in the forums, "The Original Spamusements!" could add, "Find out why we're all here" or something. Or perhaps the "Spamusement!" button could read "The Original Spamusement! Find out where we came from" or some such.

3 - How about a glossary? We could explain what "internetless" means, and why I am right now.

Comics on front page? First, programatically, I don't want to throw in the code that pulls the images out of posts on the front page. Second, I'm not sure tiny thumbnails next to the "ten latest" will work. I kinda based this "list approach" on StevenF's original spamusement site front page. I suppose I could do a comlete redesign and instead of the top 10 I could do the top 4, quarter the client area below the top title and show mini images there ... maybe later.

Alternately, I could change the ads to link directly to the latest (or maybe first?) comic.

Nav buttons/Random button on comics page: I like this, haven't gotten to it yet.

Put in a bit more space for the "About Us/Forums" scribbles, added a bit of color to the scribbles, and enbiggened the "Latest Comics" header so it stands out against the scribblings.

Yeah, being the Official Spamusement Fan Site just doesn't mean so much anymore. I just replaced that text with "Cartoons!"

A glossary might be nice if any of this work I'm doing results in new people actually visit the forums which doesn't seem to be happening.

So anyways, I've slightly changed around the front page. As usual IE seems to be a bit weird. It looks good in IE10, but if I view the front page in IE's "compatability mode" the line spacing goes all wonky. If you have IE take a look and let me know your IE version and what you see.

What about instead of grabbing from posts, using the images you've already cached and indexed?

I just think that without something visual on the front page, people are going to skip over the site. Even a single random comic selected from a pool of a dozen or so would do the trick (I cast my vote for "blau").

I'm not in favor of thumbnails on the home page, but I'll admit my thoughts on this are my own. Part of the attraction of the cartoons, for me, is the disconnect between the subject line and the image. One sees the subject line ("Hey you totally forgot!!"), one's mind tries to conjure up an image, one clicks the line, and one is surprised and/or amused by the image one eventually sees. Putting thumbnails not only short-circuits that process,it also makes clicking to see the full image redundant.

That said, graphics of some kind on the front page would make it more interesting. Maybe a montage of our characters or memorable drawings, a random "greatest hit" cartoon like "Blau," or pictures of my cat. I just don't think we should "blow the punchline" of some of our jokes.

Null wrote:That said, graphics of some kind on the front page would make it more interesting. Maybe a montage of our characters or memorable drawings, a random "greatest hit" cartoon like "Blau," or pictures of my cat. I just don't think we should "blow the punchline" of some of our jokes.

What, you don't like my new scribblings? (PS hit Ctrl+F5 if you don't see different scribblings from before) I AM CRUSHED (no not really) PS how's the new "hey look at me!" border to the first comic link?

I'm with Null that the real comedy here is reading the title then the cartoon. It's the key to the whole "spamusement" idea. So if I leave the list as-is and maybe move to the left and put one or two random cartoons on the right. I could do that but I'm not really fond of the work involved.

OTOH, scribbling in some "greatest hits" in and around the borders on either side of the list ... I like that idea. I like it a lot. If you all want to nominate your favorite characters/comics maybe I can work something up.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on the comics page whenever I can steal a moment. It's ... arg. Annoying. First, the whole social buttons displaying and THEN resizing to get in line, thus making EVERY rickin'-frackin' COMIC "jump" when you first load the page is durned annoying. I've gotta fix that.

I've updated the comic display page. We have (1) a random button. It's not perfect but it should do. (2) Taken care of the worst aspects of the social buttons' resizing problems. If the comic image is sufficiently wide you won't see any "image jump" at all. If it's not wide enough you will see some repositioning but it's not as bad as before.

I have implemented a caption tag! To see it in action, take a look at Empty Can's Final Extravaganza. I edited ED's post and replaced his font size/bold tags with caption tags so that the post looks identical to his original post, but now each subtitle shows up on the front page.

I have also implemented a captionwithurl tag, which I edited into Dween's 50th in place of the simple URL tag that had been there.

I added a new post the How to Post a Guest Strip sticky that explains caption usage. Edit: Wow, that's the first addition to that sticky in over seven years. At this rate it'll overflow onto a second page in 172½ years.

PonderThis wrote:I have implemented a caption tag! To see it in action, take a look at Empty Can's Final Extravaganza. I edited ED's post and replaced his font size/bold tags with caption tags so that the post looks identical to his original post, but now each subtitle shows up on the front page.

I have also implemented a captionwithurl tag, which I edited into Dween's 50th in place of the simple URL tag that had been there.

My long-lined comics have now been captionated. I may have missed some, as I was eyeballing the lines as they appeared in my list and guessing whether or not the Subject box was too small for them, but I think I got all of them.

Now of course there's no way all that will fit on the front page, so I picked twelve that I thought would look good and created a test front page. Please take a look at it (http://www.spamusers.com) and let me know what you think. In the future I could have it randomly select twelve but that's a lot more work than I want to do right now.

Last edited by PonderThis on Fri Mar 29, 2013 7:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:Edit: Test main page is now the actual main page.

The MSP Fan Adventures ad ran for a week and got us 57 unique clicks. It was pretty cheap when I first got it but after a week its price suddenly shot up so I decided not to renew it at that point. I'll probably go back at some point and put in a "low ball" bid and see what happens.

Last week I put in ads on Optipess (the big sideline tower ad), Gunnerkrigg Court (the square box ad with no overlying text), and Questionable Content (a teeny tiny button ad). The results were 5, 10, and 52 respectively. I guess Optipess just doesn't get that much traffic. GC was running "filler" last week so maybe that affected it. It's funny that the itty bitty button on QC did so (comparatively) well!

Over the weekend I decided to shell out some big bucks (well, for me) and ran a tower ad on SMBC, which resulted in 326 people visiting our site. Wooo! Still, nobody has joined up on the forums yet, but advertising is a numbers game. All I can do is keep trying.

Which brings me to the current situation. The ads all stopped Sunday night because the funds ran out quicker than I thought they would. I'm having some payment weirdness going on with Paypal (which is the only way they accept payment grrrr) but I got some funds in there and the ads are going again. We'll see what happens next.

Oh and if you know of a site with Project Wonderful ads on it that you think is a good match please let me know!

Well it depends on the website I think. The "poop out cartoons" is just a funny turn of phrase I think fits in with SMBC pretty well. Still, I never intended to have JUST these ads, I was kinda hoping people would help me out so I can rotate them in and out. Seriously, I'd like to have some more ads to use. And since the ad on GC seems to be back, that's four sites we're on right now. So that means we now have the "skyscraper" ads on two sites, one "square" (125x125), and one "button" (117x30). Any site suggestions/new ads are welcome.

Hmmm ... I do currently have the two "skyscraper" ads, though, so I can swap'em out. EDIT: OK, I swapped 'em.